SF takes a another step toward building a high-speed...

1of2Mayor Mark Farrell has long backed a San Fran
cisco high-speed Inter
net network and leads the current effort.Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle

2of2The Hall of Justice, Thursday, Oct. 26, 2017, in San Francisco, Calif. The Board of Supervisors will vote Tuesday on whether to approve three property leases that would allow various city departments to move out of the old Hall of Justice, but three supervisors might hold up the process because they think the city should purchase new buildings rather than lease them.Photo: Santiago Mejia / The Chronicle

San Francisco’s attempt to bring affordable, high-speed Internet service to every home and business in the city is set to take a major step forward Wednesday as city officials begin choosing private-sector partners to build the network at the lowest possible cost.

After three years of deciding what a city-owned fiber-optic Internet network would look like, the Department of Technology on Wednesday will invite Internet providers, telecommunication experts, financial firms and other players to submit plans for constructing and operating the network.

The network would be owned by the city but built and managed as a public-private partnership — an arrangement that allows the city to blunt some of the costs and risks of creating a brand-new utility. The city would maintain significant control over the price consumers would pay if they sign up for the service.

The city will winnow down the responses it receives to three teams, from which it will select a plan. The city has mandated that its partner adhere to the principles of net neutrality, which ensure that all Internet traffic to legal websites is treated equally.

The city is also requiring subsidies for low-income residents, along with privacy protections for customers’ data.

Overall the project, which has been spearheaded by Mayor Mark Farrell, is expected to cost between $1.5 billion and $1.8 billion, but that figure could come down, depending on how it is financed. The project would make San Francisco by far the largest city in the country to operate a high-speed municipal Internet service.

Farrell and other officials have billed the project as essential to closing the city’s digital divide. About 100,000 San Franciscans don’t have an Internet connection at home, according to city data.

— Dominic Fracassa

There’s no justice: An outsize group of San Francisco politicians, city officials and private law firms has asked Gov. Jerry Brown to send $1.6 billion back to the state’s judicial branch to help fund the design and construction of a new facility to house San Francisco Superior Court’s Criminal Division. That department is currently located in the troubled Hall of Justice on Bryant Street.

In a letter sent to the governor’s office last Thursday, Mayor Mark Farrell, District Attorney George Gascón and Board of Supervisors President London Breed joined a long list of city leaders and lawyers asking Brown to reinstate the money, which they said had been “repurposed” to address state budget shortfalls since 2009.

Meanwhile, facing increasingly squalid conditions at the Hall of Justice, city officials have begun moving personnel out of the building, which has housed a variety of law enforcement staff and jail inmates for decades. Once the inmates are relocated, according to the letter, the only department that will remain in the building is the Superior Court’s Criminal Division.

Built in 1958, the Hall of Justice is widely deemed to have outlived its usefulness and, on top of fending off rodent infestations, flooding and crumbling infrastructure, it’s also been deemed seismically unsafe, putting those in the building in jeopardy in the event of an earthquake.

A statewide courthouse rebuilding effort was supposed to be funded by a $5 billion pool of money authorized by legislation signed in 2008, but the funds have not been used for their intended purposes, the letter states. That has forced the judicial branch to delay or suspend numerous rebuilding efforts across the state.

Dominic Fracassa covers San Francisco City Hall for The Chronicle. He previously worked as a reporter and editor for the Daily Journal, a legal affairs newspaper. He started in news in his home state of Michigan, where he worked as a news director of 103.9 WLEN.